Re: Problem with amverify

[Ben Elliston]

   The basic problem is, how do you know (programatically, in a shell
   script) that it's a tar image?  All we have is the name of the dump
   program, which might be "tar" or "gtar" or "gnutar" or
   "gtar-1.12+amanda-patches". And this will get even more complicated
   when the DUMPER-API is implemented and the client program is an
   arbitrary name.

By looking at byte 257 of the file?

# POSIX tar archives
257     string          ustar\0         POSIX tar archive
257     string          ustar\040\040\0 GNU tar archive

Ben